If you’re not welcome at church, where are you welcome? Once just a rhetorical question, it has taken on new import in the wake of the recent events in Bertha, Minn., where the Roman Catholic Church got a restraining order to keep a teenager with autism from disrupting its masses.

In fact, disruptions are not at all unusual during services, especially at downtown Minneapolis churches, where clergy deal with everything from people trying to give their own sermons to a man who recently marched down the main aisle of Central Lutheran Church carrying a suspicious-looking aluminum briefcase.

But the clergy, who feel that it’s part of their mission to embrace the local communities, take it all in stride.

“We’re an open campus that serves a community with a lot of street people,” said the Rev. D. Foy Christopherson of Central Lutheran Church, 333 S. 12th St. “And we welcome them with open arms.”

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Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign on Thursday was forced to again apologize for the remarks of a Chicago pastor and friend backing his candidacy who spoke from the pulpit of Obama’s longtime South Side church.

In an Internet video recorded Sunday, Rev. Michael Pfleger, an outspoken activist Catholic priest, is seen mocking Sen. Hillary Clinton from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

“When Hillary was crying, and people said that was put on, I really don’t believe it was put on,” Pfleger said. “I really believe that she just always thought this is mine. I’m Bill’s wife, I’m white and this is mine. I just gotta get up and step into the plate and then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama,’ and she said, ‘Oh, damn. Where did you come from? I’m white. I’m entitled. There’s a black man stealing my show.’ ”

Obama expressed disappointment.

“As I have traveled this country, I’ve been impressed not by what divides us, but by all that unites us,” Obama said in a statement. “That is why I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger’s divisive, backward-looking rhetoric.”

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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: The Vatican reported this week that the number of Catholics in religious orders around the world continued to decline. In the latest figures for 2006, there were just over 945,000 monks and nuns, down about 7,000 from the year before. The overwhelming majority, 753,000, about 80 percent, were women. Around the U.S. the number of nuns has also been going down, and their average age rising. But there are a few places where the reverse is true. Betty Rollin found a Dominican teaching order in Nashville fairly bursting with dedicated young nuns.

BETTY ROLLIN: They are the Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia in Nashville, Tennessee, a traditional order that began in 1860. Their day begins at 5 a.m. with meditation followed by a Mass. Meals are held in silence. Their vocation is to teach. The sisters here have come from different states and different backgrounds, most of them raised Catholic, some not. In 1965, there were about 180,000 nuns in America. By 2007, that number dropped to 63,000 with an average age of 70. The average age of the Dominican sisters is 36. Their numbers have increased so steadily in the past 15 years that they have had to build a 100,000 square-foot addition to the property. The sisters here — the first year postulants, the second year novices, and those who, after seven years, have taken their final vows all say they have been called by God and that they are in love.

Sister KATHERINE WILEY: When you’re a little girl, you’re planning your wedding, you’re playing bride. But just to allow the Lord to transform my heart to see that I would still be a bride, but I would be his bride.

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A chapter of Minneapolis church history closed this week, a story soon to be repeated in St. Paul.

St. Thomas Episcopal Church, 4400 4th Av. S., one of the first black Episcopal churches in the state, held a deconsecration service Tuesday evening. A similar fate awaits St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in St. Paul, another one of the state’s first primarily black churches, which will close by the end of June.

The two congregations, both of which date to the early 1900s, are forming a new church, the location and name of which is still to be determined. And while the birth of the new church is considered a bright spot for many of the members, the atmosphere at St. Thomas was somber.

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According to a preservation group called PreserveCW, the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee, unless convinced otherwise, may sell an ecologically diverse camp property in Waushara County to commercial developers. Consideration of a sale has begun just five months after ceasing operation of Camp Webb at the Wautoma, Wisconsin property. Camp Webb had been a religiously-based camping program there since 1961. The camp property of 135 acres contains a diverse mixture of deciduous woods, pine woods, beachfront, swampland, grasslands and prairie fields.

The diocese’s Executive Council discussed the possibility of sale in early May after receiving a report from diocesan officials who had met with a commercial developer to discuss potential development of condominiums. A formal vote to put the camp up for sale is the first agenda item for June 5th Executive Council meeting. After learning of the situation, PreserveCW, a group formed to preserve the camp, asked supporters to contact Bishop Steven Miller and Executive Council members to ask that they seriously consider non-commercial options for the camp before considering sale to commercial interests.

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Both Barack Obama and John McCain have faced controversy because of sermons and statements by clergy who endorsed their candidacies for president. RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY managing editor Kim Lawton talks about the responsibilities of pastors and politicians with Ambassador Tony Hall, a Democrat from Ohio who served in the House of Representatives for nearly 25 years. Hall says candidates should not be held accountable for everything that clergy who have endorsed them have said and done. He also praises his party for improving its faith-based outreach.

Watch and listen to it all.

Writing in the first edition of the current affairs magazine, Standpoint, Dr Nazir-Ali said the decline of Christianity produced a lack of “transcendental principles” which has left the door open for the “comprehensive” claims of radical Islam.

The bishop, who was born in Pakistan of Christian parents, said Christianity had knitted together a “rabble of mutually hostile tribes” to create British identity.

But Dr Nazir-Ali said the loss of what he called the Christian consensus had led to the breakdown of the family, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and a loss of respect for other people.

He said the marginalisation of Christianity had happened just as large numbers of people of other faiths arrived in Britain.

Read it all as well as Bishop Nazir-Ali’s whole article linked in the first sentence above.

Scott Simon talks with Mickey Rapkin about his new book, “Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory,” which weaves together the drama of three groups trying to claim glory without instruments.

As someone who sang in such a group in secondary school and College, I loved it. Listen to it all.